One Immersion: Living a Life and Coming Back
Read slowly, aloud, leaving a breath between lines; twenty minutes. Record it and play it back, or have someone you trust read it to you.
Before you begin. This practice follows Gādhi's sequence: an intention, an immersion, a gentle confusion, one scene of another life held lightly, a return, and a discernment. It is safe for most healthy adults. It is not a method for recovering memories, of this life or any other, and nothing that arises in it should be treated as evidence. Do not practise it unsupervised if you have, or have had, a psychotic illness, a dissociative disorder, depersonalisation or derealisation, uncontrolled epilepsy, or trauma that still produces flashbacks. Do not use it if you are feeling low or have had thoughts of not wanting to live. If you have a fear of water or have ever nearly drowned, replace the lake with the image of standing in a field of tall, warm grass up to your shoulders. Practise it seated, in a chair, never in a bath, a pool or any real water, and never while driving or operating anything.
How to return at any moment. Say aloud, "I am the same," and your name. Lift your feet a little and set them down. Count from one to five and open your eyes on five.
Sit down, and let your feet rest flat on the floor.
Before you close your eyes, say in one sentence what you wish to understand. Not what you wish to see: what you wish to understand. Gādhi asked to understand the delusion that covers the world. You might ask to understand how your mind makes a life.
Now close your eyes.
You are standing in a lake at night. The water is cool and still and comes up to your neck. Lotuses float around you, closed for the night. The moon is in the sky and the stars are scattered about her, and their light lies on the water.
Your body is below the surface. Your head rests on it like a lotus on its stem. The water holds you. You do not have to hold yourself.
Let the breath slow. Each out-breath, the water is a little stiller.
Now, silently, begin to count backwards from one hundred, in threes. One hundred. Ninety-seven. Ninety-four. Keep going, at your own pace.
If you lose your place, do not go back to find it. That is the moment the water deepens. Let the numbers go, as he let the words go. Let the mind reach for the next step and find only water.
And in the stillness, a doorway opens in the surface.
Let one scene of another life come. Any life. You do not need to choose it, and you do not need to believe it.
Notice where you are. Notice the light. Notice what you are wearing, what your hands are doing.
Notice who is with you, and what they are to you.
Notice what you love here. Notice what you would be afraid to lose.
And notice that a part of you, like the stillness under the water, knows: this is a scene. It is being shown to me. I am the one who watches it.
If the scene turns towards harm, illness or death, you do not need to follow it. Let the water close gently over it, and return to the moonlit lake. Nothing here requires you to stay.
Let the scene move, if it wants to. Notice when its feeling is fullest: a joy, a grief, a pride, a longing.
When the feeling is at its fullest, let that be the signal.
The water lifts you.
Come back slowly, as one wakes from sleep.
This is the same water. The same sky. The same earth under your feet.
Say inwardly, then aloud: "I am the same," and your name. "In the same place," and the name of the place where you are sitting.
Notice the scene drawing away, like a reflection when the water moves.
Now ask, gently, not whether it was yours, and not whether it happened. Ask: what did it show me? What did it show me about how my mind makes a life, its loves, its losses, its pride, its fears? Let one sentence of answer come.
Notice whether any feeling has come back with you that belongs to the scene: shame, longing, grief. If so, rinse it off in the water. Watch it dissolve like a stain in a clear lake. It was part of the scene. You do not need to carry it out.
Now lift your feet from the bottom of the lake, and step up onto the bank.
Feel your feet on the floor. Press them down.
Feel your hands. Move the fingers. Feel the seat holding you.
Breathe in fully, and let the shoulders rise and fall.
I will count from one to five, and on five your eyes open, clear and rested.
One. The breath is full and ordinary.
Two. The hands and feet are warm and your own.
Three. The sounds of the room return.
Four. Take one deep breath in, and stretch a little.
Five. Eyes open. Here. Now. Awake.
Say your name aloud, the date, and the place. Name three things you can see. If you feel at all far away, repeat the count from one to five, stand, walk a few steps, drink some water. Do not drive or operate anything for ten minutes.
Write down the one sentence of what you understood. Do not go looking for the scene in the world.
Then go back to your work, as the god told him: unshaken in the discharge of your duties.